I need help with the installation of Windows XP home. About a week ago my master hard drive crashed. I purchased a new hard drive from new egg and started to install it as my master last night. I let the windows installation program run from the windows cd overnight. When I woke up this morning a message was displayed stating something along the lines of that it was unable to boot from the cdrom. Pres ctrl+alt+del to restart. I did so and it restarted. The computer then promted me to press any key to boot from the cd rom. I did so and windows set up began to run again. At the point I can select which partition to format, I chose C:. Setup informed me that it could not install on C because it already had an operating system. I restarted the computer and removed the windows cd. I encountered the same error as before, windows is unable to start pres crtl+alt+del to restart. Any suggestions? I am running an AMD athalon 2100+ with 512 ram. I have a slave drive, but it appears to have an incomplete version of windows on it. I.E. when I set it as my master I can not run most programs that come with windows.

I just restarted the computer to find out exactly what it says. It says the following (with the windows cd removed for the drive): Searching for boot record from CD…not found Searching for boot record from floppy…not found Searching for boot record for IDE-0…OK Disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+alt+del to restart

bclacquer ".... I can select which partition to format, I chose C:. Setup informed me that it could not install on C because it already had an operating system. " Yes - you will first have to Delete the Partition then Create a new one then Format and then Install Lesley

I did as suggested by lesley and the same problem occured. after windows copied the files and rebooted I recieved the following error: Searching for boot record from CD…not found Searching for boot record from floppy…not found Searching for boot record for IDE-0…OK Disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+alt+del to restart I was looking at a print out I made for the the recovery counsol, on it is a comand to stop windows from restarting after the file copy part. is this something that will work if I were to run winnt32.exe and then that command? I have never run the recovery consoul before, however I have a new hard drive and cannot lose anything.

download a diagnostic from the harddrive manufacturer and check this new drive. Just because it's new doesn't mean it cannot be faulty. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.